Mailchimp is a very well-known email marketing tool that integrates with popular apps and services like Salesforce, Eventbrite, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, and SurveyMonkey. This inbound marketing tool allows you to easily sync your data from those services, import content from other sources, and learn how your campaigns are affecting your business. Along with reports to show you how well you’re connecting with your audience and how much money you’re bringing in, Mailchimp gives you tips for improvement. Mailchimp Mobile Dashboard enables you to check in from anywhere.
Be responsive: Emails need to look good across multiple devices. With over 50% of emails being opened on mobile, this is more important than ever. Look out for single column templates and test to see if it looks good on desktops, tablets, and phones. At DirectIQ, we offer the ability to test and preview your emails before you send them to your subscribers.

Have a clear purpose for the blast. Email blasting customers or partners is not an arbitrary task. Each blast should have a concise purpose before you begin to draft it. Determine what you're trying to deliver and how you want the recipients to react to the email. The blast's purpose could be enticing customers to purchase something, updating employees on a new project or initiative, or a newsletter to recap the month's events. Once you determine the purpose of the blast, you can work on making the message more clear to your recipients.[1]

Are you willing to alienate people who disagree with your opinion? Sure, not everyone who disagrees with you will unsubscribe. But if you can’t take the risk of alienating a large portion of them, it’s better to avoid the topic. The only exception are friendly disagreements. For example, it can be a good idea to show your support for a specific sport team, even if you know many in your audience like another team. As long as they don’t take the sport very seriously, it can be just a fun thing to talk about. I could, for example, tell that I’m more of a dog person (we have two dogs) than a cat person. I have nothing against cats, but I like walking with dogs. I doubt almost any cat person will hold that against me.

Send the email. Once you've uploaded the contacts that you want to send the email to, it's time to send the email to the list. Go over the recipients one more time before sending the email and then send it out. Another option that you have is to schedule the blast to go out at a later date and time. This is a great idea if you may have to make last-minute revisions or want to choose a specific time to send it out.

Watch the growth of your list. Is your email list growing or shrinking? If more people are unsubscribing than are registering to your list, it's a good sign that you need an entire strategic overhaul on your email policies. If there are a lot of people unsubscribing it could be because your content is not relevant to the people that you're sending it to. In this case, try to segment your list differently or change the type of content that's being delivered through your email blasts.

Do people who share your view see you as more relatable or trustworthy because of your opinion? Not all opinions or even values make much of a (positive) difference. For example, I could point out that I think people should be treated as equals regardless of their gender or sexuality. Most people who agree with that don’t think much about it. It’s such an obvious thing to them. So, telling that doesn’t make much of a difference to people who agree with me. However, many people who disagree with that might think I’m crazy.
Want your link testing stream-lined? Put the email through a landing page test and within minutes, you’re going to get an overlay of that email with complete results for every link. The ESP tracking report inserts a tracking pixel in your email and you get subscriber data such as how and where the email was opened, how much time the user spent time reading it, and if it was organically forwarded or printed.
A significant element of email marketing is relationship. Does a recipient trust you? Does a recipient even know who you are? When an email jumps the gun by forcing familiarity too soon, the personalization comes across as skeevy. Intimacy is earned in real life, and it would appear to be the same way with email. Take this example from my inbox; no one has called me lowercase kevan l lee in years.
Email blasts are a great way to send bulk correspondence with businesses or consumers. Eblasts can contain special promotional information to customers or critical updates to other businesses. Sending ineffective or irrelevant emails to people will cause them to ignore future emails and can tarnish your company's reputation. Luckily, there are ways that you can optimize writing your e-blasts so that they captivate the largest audience possible. By using best practices to write and send your email and by evaluating the progress and effectiveness of them, you'll be able to reach a much wider customer base.
There’s no denying that email is a huge part of our lives. We receive lots of emails every day – whether its for work, from friends or even from that webshop you purchased from three months back. It is and remains a great way of getting a message across to your target audience without being too invasive. Because email marketing is so effective, it’s role has only become stronger in recent years, even with the rise in popularity of social channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. As a result, there are several great email marketing tools available to choose from, many of which cater to the creation, design, distribution and analysis of emails used in email marketing campaigns.
Use your real email signature: Just like using a real reply-to email address, you want to use real contact information within the email and the best way to do that is to include your contact details in the email signature. Giving your readers the opportunity to contact you or connect with you online is a great way to be personal and build a relationship with them.
If you are a small business, email marketing templates can be extremely handy. They are designed to be easy-to-use, adaptable, and fit in with any campaign.There are hundreds of thousands of templates out there, many of them free. At DirectIQ, we provide email templates as a part of our services, both for free and paid users.A good template must have the following features:
Purchased lists are ineffective, and they impact everyone else who uses Mailchimp, too. If you send emails to a list of people whose contact info you bought, many of the emails will get identified as spam. Some spam filters will flag a campaign if anyone with the same IP has sent spam in the past. When you use Mailchimp, your email is delivered through our servers, so if one person sends spam, it could prevent other users’ emails from reaching inboxes. But by forbidding Mailchimp users from using purchased lists, we increase deliverability for everyone.
First of all, BuzzFeed has awesome subject lines and preview text. They are always short and punchy -- which fits in perfectly with the rest of BuzzFeed's content. I especially love how the preview text will accompany the subject line. For example, if the subject line is a question, the preview text is the answer. Or if the subject line is a command (like the one below), the preview text seems like the next logical thought right after it:
At worst, you might think I’m a bit weird for caring so much about sound quality. Or you might think I’m really weird if you knew that my loudspeakers are computer calibrated to my room. Or you might question my priorities if you knew I set up my office, so that my desk is nearly in the middle of it… mainly to be able to enjoy music better. But we’re all weird in some ways (and I’ll let you think this is the weirdest thing about me).
Be clear about what people can get and how to get it. This is the backbone of this email marketing strategy. Tell people about the benefits they can get. Write a separate email about each major benefit, if you want. Make sure those benefits come out clearly. But also keep it conversational. Don’t just list a bunch of benefits and expect people to buy. Also, remember to be clear about what they need to do to get those benefits. Tell them to “click here” or “apply for a consultation.” Don’t force people to think about how to move forward. It’s not that they couldn’t figure it out. It’s just unnecessary (and therefor annoying) when you could make it easy for them.
Thanks for the article, it was also interesting and inspiring to see your other ventures in diverse fields. Would like to connect 1:1 in the near future. Meanwhile, even I had done a similar comparison as I myself handle email marketing for my organization. Do check it out as well as for the readers of the blog since it covers 2 additional players.
Are you willing to alienate people who disagree with your opinion? Sure, not everyone who disagrees with you will unsubscribe. But if you can’t take the risk of alienating a large portion of them, it’s better to avoid the topic. The only exception are friendly disagreements. For example, it can be a good idea to show your support for a specific sport team, even if you know many in your audience like another team. As long as they don’t take the sport very seriously, it can be just a fun thing to talk about. I could, for example, tell that I’m more of a dog person (we have two dogs) than a cat person. I have nothing against cats, but I like walking with dogs. I doubt almost any cat person will hold that against me.
Non-promotional emails, on the other hand, will be less sales-driven and timely, and more focused on building relationships and providing value to your customers. While promotional email campaigns generally tend to yield a higher click-through rate, non-promotional messages allow you to see what interests your email subscribers so you can segment accordingly. You can follow up later with more targeted messages that help to nurture your relationship with these audiences.
Double-check your email blast. After you've written your email blast, you should go over it again for grammar and spelling errors. An excellent way to help you edit your email is to send it to colleagues to ensure that there aren't any factual or grammatical mistakes, and to make sure that the messaging stays on brand. Ask people on your team to look over your blast and provide you with feedback.
Emails triggered by milestones, like anniversaries and birthdays, are fun to get -- who doesn't like to celebrate a special occasion? The beauty of anniversary emails, in particular, is that they don't require subscribers to input any extra data, and they can work for a variety of senders. Plus, the timeframe can be modified based on the business model.

Your campaign can be completed once you select your recipients and other campaign-specific details. In the Content section, you’ll find an incredibly useful WYSIWYG editor used for HTML content. Add images, drag and drop items, format text and copy/paste any text you want in your email. Want this layout and format to be used by default for every campaign? Save to Library and you’re covered.

CakeMail is an email marketing tool intended for small businesses that makes sending out emails very easy. All users to have to do is title their new campaign, set up list of recipients, give their email a design and select a time to send it out. There is also an advanced editing section which is great for users who are more experienced with HTML. CakeMail can be integrated with Google Analytics so users have access to detailed reports on insights such as open rates, unsubscribe rates, click and bounce.

Sender Score is Return Path’s comprehensive reputation measurement. Sender Score is a number between 0 and 100 that identifies your sender reputation and shows you how mailbox providers view your IP address. Your Sender Score is like a bank running your credit score to gauge your credit history. Knowing your score is the first step to improving it (and therefore your email deliverability).